


Not As I Do

by ABeckoningCat



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:24:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABeckoningCat/pseuds/ABeckoningCat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha is concerned about Clint's reckless behavior since the events in Manhattan, but can't seem to take her own advice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not As I Do

“Are you smoking?”  
  
“I’m not smoking.”  
  
“Because it sounds like you’re smoking.”  
  
Clint pinched the cigarette away from his lips, eyes narrowing as he pressed his earpiece more firmly.  
  
“How can it sound like I’m smoking?  How is that even possible?”  
  
“I can hear when you blow the smoke out.  It makes a sound on the com.”  
  
He looked guiltily to the Marlboro still burning down to a column of ash in his fingertips, glared, and crushed it out in the—- nnnnwait, just one more.  A long, sucking draw, a slow double-streamed exhale of smoke through his nose, and  _then_  he crushed it out in the gravel under his knee.  
  
“I’m not smoking,” he reiterated.  
  
“Now you’re not.  But you were.  Because you’ve lost all sense of self-preservation.”  
  
“That has nothing to do with it,” he complained, realizing even as he said the words aloud that he was tacitly admitting to having snuck a smoke.  He adjusted one hand around the grip of his bow, resettling for comfort as he scanned the pockets of light on the empty parking lot below.  “You want to blame it on anything, blame it on Stark.”  
  
“What does he have to do with it?”  
  
“Goddamned cigars and brandy every fucking night.  Hey, Barton, join us out on the balcony.  Yo, Arrows, don’t you want to try this?  C’mon, they’re three hundred dollars a piece, just had them flown in, come be a big fucking douchebag with me—”  
  
“Did he actually say that?”  
  
“I might have improvised the douchebag part.  But it’s not a stretch.”  
  
“Truth.”  
  
Clint thumbed his scope clean and put his eye to it, tracking the lot left-to-right in an absent search for tripwires, cameras, anything he might have missed on the half-dozen scans he’d already made of the area.  It was still clean.  
  
“So, anyway, I gave in.”  
  
“You had one cigar.”  
  
“One.”  
  
“And then two.”  
  
“And then, like, twelve, yeah, you can see where this is going.  Look, you know what I’m like.  Remember when they came out with Dorito-shell Tacos?  Remember what happened?”  
  
“Tacos for breakfast lunch and dinner.”  
  
“Like fucking crack.  I can’t help myself.  I’m no good resisting things that give me pleasure, even when they’re bad for me.”  He gave a slightly jerking grin, removing his eye from the sight.  “Speaking of which, how  _you_  doin’?”  
  
“Hilarious.”  
  
“C’mon, Nat, lighten up.  Half an hour and this guy will be dead, and we can go back to our nice luxurious two-star motel with the semen stains on the ceiling.”  
  
“I should have never bought you that blacklight.”  
  
“I just want to know how it happened, is all I’m saying.  I need to meet that guy.”  
  
“Barton, this has nothing to do with smoking, or Stark, or semen stains on the ceiling—”  
  
“It has a  _little_  to do with semen—”  
  
“ _It has nothing at all to do with semen_ , and everything to do with the fact that you’ve got a death wish.”  
  
He lowered his Hoyt, sitting back now as he adjusted his weight on the prickle and pinch of gravel.  These kneepads were for shit.  
  
“What?  I do not.”  
  
“You do too.  Ever since…”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Ever _since_ , you’ve been… I don’t know.  You just fly headlong into danger anymore.  You take risks.  I can’t tell if you’re blaming yourself and trying to make up for some perceived debt—”  
  
“Oh, we’re going to talk debt now?”  
  
“I’m serious.  It’s been eight months.  Eight months, and you’ve broken both arms, three ribs, gotten a concussion and needed three hundred and seventy four stitches, thank God not all at the same time.”  
  
Clint grew silent, unsmiling, one hand twitching for the rumpled pack of Marlboros stashed in his belt pouch before he closed his hand into a tight fist of self-restraint.  
  
He said, “I’m not… look.  This is our job, yeah?  This is business, it’s what we do.  I’ve always gotten hurt.”  
  
“Not like this.  We’ve always taken knocks, but this seems… I don’t know.  Deliberate.  Reckless.”  
  
The silence over the line persisted, and Clint glossed his teeth with his tongue before reaching almost nervously back for an arrow, drawing free an empty shaft and rolling it over his knuckles, end over end.  
  
“Hey.  I’m sorry.  I promise I’m not doing it on purpose.  Not… not consciously, anyway.”  
  
“It’s happening too much, is what I’m saying.  There are accidents and then there are… I just.  I can’t go into every mission wondering how bloody and torn up you’re going to come out of it this time.  I never used to have to do that before.”  
  
He watched the spin of the carbon shaft, the neat dart of his fingers as he manipulated it, then reached up to touch the earpiece again.  
  
“I’ll do better.”  
  
“Promise me.”  
  
“I don’t like making promises.”  
  
“This is diff…”  
  
Clint listened, blinking, then frowned when her voice simply strayed off into silence.  
  
“…Nat?”  
  
“ _Shh_.”  
  
No warning could have set him more on edge than this, and Clint knelt forward onto the edge of the building, only now seeing the liquid black of a dealership-new sedan parked to one side of the lot.  Christ, when did that get there?  
  
“Nat, company,” he warned, rising smoothly backward and tucking the arrow back into its slot, manipulating the grip to load it with a broadhead as he paced swiftly for the firetower stairs.  
  
“I see them,” she said.  
  
“Talk to me.”  
  
“Three men, entering the building now.  Looks like our guy and two bodyguards.”  
  
“Don’t do anything stupid, I’m coming.”  
  
“Yeah, well hurry, these guys have got…”  
  
“Nat?”  
  
“Shit—”  
  
“ _Nat?_ ”  
  
He was halfway down the first flight of stairs when he heard the cracking report of a semi-automatic, and the surge of an explosion heaved him to the landing, as if the building itself had rolled with a shudder.  He had only enough time to register the crushing pain in his ribs, that Natasha was probably going to give him hell about that now, when he heard another quartet of rapid trigger pulls.  
  
Scrambling back to his feet, pinballing down the narrow stairwell as he took the steps three at a time, Clint reached back to snatch the loaded arrow from his quiver.  
  
“NAT, talk to me—”  
  
“Nhnnnnnfffuck… fuck…. that was fast—”  
  
“ _Natalia_ , you fucking talk to me, where are you, what’s happening—”  He leapt down to the landing, leading through the door with the arrow knocked at full draw, but the corridor was empty.  A hiss of frustration and he turned, moving swiftly down the next flight of stairs.  
  
Her voice trembled with fear.  “Sssshhit… I’ve got.  Two.  I can see two—”  
  
“Two what—?”  
  
“— _holes_ , two holes—”  
  
“Oh, Christ, where, where are they—”  Landing, door, left and right.  Still nothing.  He jerked back into the stairwell and moved down.  
  
“Ugghhchrist… wait…”  
  
“Nat, words, sounds, I need you to make some sense here.  Are they gone, where are these guys, where are you, where are you hit?”  
  
“No…dead.  I killed the one, the other guy took out himself and the… nhnnn…ffffuck, Clint—”  
  
“Я иду к тебе, маленькая девочка,” he promised her, voice altering with a crack of panic.  Landing, door, left and right.  Only darkness.  “Мы идем домой сегодня вечером, мы идем домой вместе, ты слышишь меня?”  
  
“Th… the lobby, I’m at the lobby—”  
  
The descent was a blur, a twisting kaleidoscope of stairs and railings and landings, one after the other.  He didn’t remember dropping the arrow or hanging the bow across his chest, but by the time he raced free of the fire stairs and into the still-smoking rubble of the ground level, both hands were free.  
  
And there was blood.  So much blood.  
  
“Nat?”  He stepped over one suited corpse, then another.  A third was just a pulp of blood and bone and Armani, and he felt the squelch underfoot as he climbed over the debris of masonry and shattered glass.  More blood, a snail-trail through the smoke, and there she was, crawling for the door as if towards a desert oasis.  
  
“Nat—”  He turned her over, forgetting everything SHIELD had drilled into them about combat care, the gentle handling of fresh wounds and broken bones, just desperate to see her face, meet her eyes, know that she would be OK.  She was half-limp in the manipulation of his hands, candle pale in a way that made her eyes vibrant as burning envy.  “Hey.  Hey, talk to me — where—-?  Nat?  Where are you hit?”  
  
“…down…”  
  
His hands traveled fast over her shoulders, ribs, eyes darting to his fingertips for the first scarlet sign of blood, but there was nothing.  No shreds through the leather, no weeping holes, her lungs and ribs and heart were fine, all fine, so where—”  
  
“…nn— _down_ …,” she slurred, frustrated as she tried to squirm in his grasp.  
  
“Little girl, I’m looking, tell me where—down?”  He moved down her legs, still tangled together, and there finally saw the small, dark abyss of two bullet holes, one through the meat of her thigh and the other just a few crucial inches away, streaming red from a nick in her femoral.  Fear and relief hit him in a sudden surge, and he lowered her back to the floor, fumbling her belt free from her waist  “IgotitIgotit… hang on… hang on…”  
  
He zipped the belt free from beneath her, threading it back through through hidden loop under its buckle, the little design change she’d fought about with SHIELD for months until they finally, in exasperation, added it to her stock uniform.  One little change that came at a cost of thousands in production costs, and when they pressed her in annoyance all she would say was  _zhgut._  
  
Tourniquet.  
  
He had it around her thigh, high up on her leg, the muscles of his arms standing out as he cinched it tight.  Natasha cried out, stiffening in pain, but the blood ebbed to a trickle, and she breathed in sagging relief as if she’d been holding it, holding it, afraid she’d die in little lost measures of blood and air.  She barely responded as Clint’s bloodied hands came back to her face, cradling her head to look at him, wide thumbs smearing crimson across her cheeks.  
  
“Hey… hey, I got it.  I’m going to get you to the hospital—”  
  
“Nnn… no.  No hospital.  Clint.”  
  
“Nat—”  
  
“No.”  She was a little girl after a long car ride, wanting only for someone to carry her to bed.  “You do it.”  
  
“Wh—  Nat, no, you lost too much—”  
  
“…be fine…”  
  
“Nat, no, c’mon…  c’mon, no, we’ve got to…”  She tried to roll her head away from him in a show of willfull defiance, and Clint growled out a sigh, awkwardly gathering her to his chest as he stood.  “You’re fucking hard-headed, you know that?”  
  
“…good teacher…”  
  
“Yeah, you’re a goddamned riot.”  
  
The glass of the front door nearly shattered as he kicked it wide, sliding through it sidelong before it could close on him, and bore her swiftly for their mark’s black sedan still parked in the lot.  He’d just consider this a parting gift.  
  
“Keep talking to me, Nat,” he urged her, giving her a toss in his arms, already debating just how much blood she would need versus how much he could reasonably give.  Half the blood in his veins was already hers, but he was never again going to let her joke about loaning it to him with an expectation of return.  “C’mon.  Run your mouth at me, give me a hard time, just talk, stay awake.”  
  
“Clint…”  
  
“Yeah, like that, good.  What did I do wrong this time, tell me.”  
  
Natasha lolled her head on his arm, cracking her eyes open to thin, hopeful green slivers.  
  
“…can I have a smoke?”


End file.
